The 'Right Guy' Is Hard to Find (and That's Why I'm Still a Virgin at 35)

I always believed I would find true love and wanted to save my virginity for that person. When I was in my twenties sticking to this plan, I didn't expect to someday find myself 35 and still waiting.

I'm not necessarily waiting for marriage—just a loving relationship with a permanent commitment. I didn't expect it would be so hard to find. As a competitive runner, I've always finished every race I've started, but I always knew where the finish line was when the starting gun went off. Now I'm in a race of a different kind—one where the finish line is out of sight, and the end has remained out of reach.

Whenever I go home for the holidays, friends and family ask, "Why are you still single?" It's supposed to sound like a compliment, but what I really hear is, "What's wrong with you?" I don't have an answer. I'm fit, well educated, attractive, self-aware, well traveled, spiritually nourished yet curious, and socially active. Am I too picky? Too selfish? Too busy? Too noncommittal? Too overwhelmed with options? All of the above?

In the Atlantic article "All the Single Ladies," author Kate Bolick explains how (according to the Guttentag-Second theory) in a society such as ours where women outnumber men, "men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship." In our generation, she says, "fewer people marry, and those who do marry do so later in life." So is it all the guys' fault? That would certainly be an easy way to explain why I'm still single.

Maybe men are waiting longer to get married these days. But if they are, it's understandable. Having so many options, especially through online dating, could convince anyone that it's worth holding out for a better model (or if we do find someone, that we can trade up). We start to feel that if we sift through hundreds of profiles, we'll eventually stumble across our "true" love.

Well, I've been looking for "true" love all my life and haven't found it. I can't necessarily explain to you what it is either—even Shakespeare refused to define true love. I can simply tell you what I'm looking for: a mutual, loving partnership in which we both express a permanent commitment. But how does one define "permanent"? And how does one define "loving"? There's so much more to it than two people verbally saying "I love you." How do you know which loving situation is the situation and which person you love is the one? With so many undefinable terms, it's simply a risk one has to take. But when?

If you look to society for a message or guidance, you'll inevitably become as confused as I am. We're told that we need to be "whole" before we can meet the right person and yet simultaneously feed the impossible (and contradictory) goal of finding someone who "completes" us (thanks, Jerry McGuire), as if we are inherently broken.

The thing is, I do feel less than whole (despite a bookshelf of self-help books and years of yoga classes that tell me otherwise). I've kept myself busy to distract myself from the fact that I wasn't with someone. Being busy, working hard at our jobs, and then spending our precious free time training for a marathon, for example...that's praised in our culture. It's more comfortable to say we're just too busy to find someone than to have enough free time to admit to ourselves (or anyone else) that we are lonely on a Friday night.

That's not to say I haven't dated. I have. I've dated many types of men throughout the world, but all it did was cause me to create an unrealistic list of expectations. My love life has felt like going to a liberal arts college (which I did), where you sample all kinds of disciplines, know what you like and what you don't but then find it impossible to combine all those interests into a clear direction when you graduate. Like the art-history major still trying to find the right career, I feel like a dating major still trying to find the right guy.

My only conclusion is that I—not just the men I date—am obsessed with the chase. I was raised to believe that if there was something I wanted, I should go after it. And like so many women, I thought "it" was an electric spark—that special zing we see in fairy tales and grow up believing will occur with the right one. I have felt sparks with potential true-love material, but poor timing squelched them. Or I was too caught up in the chase to let them develop into a full-on fire. I've also wasted a great deal of time and emotional energy pursuing unavailable men with whom there was great chemistry but no love. Sometimes I've felt like I was simply trying to not be single so when family members asked about a man in my life, I had something to tell them. Perhaps it was a form of self-sabotage: Something inside me knew that the types of men I was chasing would never be The One, and so I would never have to consider if they were worth giving up my virginity to.

The thought of making this weighty decision now makes my stomach ache. Like so many women contemplating marriage (virgins or not), I've just continued the chase, pushing the finish line farther and farther out of reach.